Futility Closet - 243-The Peshtigo Fire

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a poem for stutterers to a deliberate ruin. This is episode 243. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1871, while the Great Chicago Fire was riveting the nation's attention, a blaze six times as deadly was ravaging a desperate town in northeastern Wisconsin. In today's show, we'll tell the story

Starting point is 00:00:38 of the Peshtigo Fire, the deadliest wildfire in American history. We'll also watch an automated western and puzzle over some discounted food. In episode 227, I described the Christmas tree ships that plied Lake Michigan in the late 19th century, delivering trees to Chicago and Milwaukee. The ships gathered those trees in the enormous northern forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, millions of acres of cedar, spruce, pine, oak, maple, beech, ash, elm, and birch. A resident named Peter Pernin described the region simply, trees, trees everywhere, nothing else but trees as far as you can travel. Pernin was a Catholic priest who served in the town of Peshtigo in northeastern Wisconsin.

Starting point is 00:01:25 His parishioners lived in a world of wood. Logging had begun there in earnest after the Civil War, and by 1871 the town had 1,700 inhabitants. Eight sawmills turned out millions of boards each year, as well as mountains of sawdust, which was shoveled into the streets, hidden under the wooden sidewalks, and simply piled next to the mills. The town straddled the Peshtigo River, and all these wood products were loaded onto ships and sent into Green Bay and then down Lake Michigan to the industrial centers to the south. As we saw in the Christmas tree episode, Lake Michigan can be treacherous, so workers were also building a rail line through the woods to Milwaukee and Chicago. Many of them lived in frame houses built hastily of pine board.

Starting point is 00:02:06 All these workers needed to clear land, and in those days that was done by setting fires. Farmers regularly burned away forest land to create new fields, and the rail workers burned their way through the woods, leaving smoldering logs and vegetation piled along the right-of-way. Normally this was manageable, but the summer and fall of 1871 had seen an extraordinary drought. With the exception of some light showers in September, three months had gone by without a drop of rain. Streams and wells ran dry, and even the rich organic bottomland soil now crunched underfoot. What had been forest land was becoming tinder. On July 5th, a hunter fired into a tree stump and walked away,

Starting point is 00:02:42 and the wadding from the shot ignited the stump and burned down three acres of pine. The rail workers' fires began to spread and ran through the county until a hundred were burning in as many miles. And the fuel for these fires was accumulating. The low water levels had prevented local lumberjacks from floating their logs down river to the mills. Instead, they piled them on the riverbanks. And tons of the branches they had stripped now littered the land north and west of Peshtigo and Marinette, where the weather had dried them. As these fires smoldered, a curtain of smoke spread over the land, uncomfortable, irritating, and growing worse. By late September, Luther Noyes, publisher of the local newspaper, wrote,

Starting point is 00:03:17 at least the flies are gone. To guard against a major conflagration, logging crews dug ditches along the edge of the forest, and workers in the towns set aside barrels of water to wet down the sawmills. But rumors said that the fire this season was different, and that the normal measures wouldn't contain it. When the wind sprang up, the fire spread into the forest canopy, sometimes advancing far enough to destroy a home or a mill. The residents grumbled about this, but they kept using fire in the woods. The smoke that covered the landscape was seen as a sign of progress. People were working, farms were growing, and the railroad was advancing.

Starting point is 00:03:50 This uneasy truce went on for weeks as the residents staved off the worst of the fires while waiting for rain. But by September 20th, it was clear that they had drifted into serious danger. Franklin Tilton, editor of the Green Bay Advocate, wrote that the morning smoke was more dense than at any other time before. The air is suffocating and is filled with flakes of ashes. On the bay, the smoke was so dense that ships had to navigate by compass and sound their foghorns. Trains on the expanding rail line were running through 50 miles of active fire, and increasingly the flames threatened to invade the settled areas by igniting haystacks, log fences, cordwood, and fence posts. Animals had begun behaving queerly. A deer had wandered out of the woods and taken up residence at Levi Hale's place next to the church on Oconto Avenue. On September 23rd,

Starting point is 00:04:34 200 men watched as thousands of birds flew confusedly up out of trees shrouded in ash, collided, tangled, screeched, and plummeted back into the burning branches. On the same day, the wind shifted and sent sparks across the Peshtigo River, where they set fire to the woodenware factory. Fires were breaking out now all along the southwestern shore of Green Bay, igniting barns, woodpiles, fences, houses, and mills. They were now raging on all sides of Peshtigo, and as soon as one was put out, another sprang up. To the south, the flames had already destroyed the telegraph lines,

Starting point is 00:05:05 leaving the town dangerously isolated. Peshtigo had no fire company, firehouse, police force, or jail. They had one hand-pumper fire engine. In the face of the advancing flames, the residents began to panic. They collected whatever belongings they could, strapped them to wagons, and set out south for Green Bay through a maelstrom of flames. One refugee who made it said the sound of the falling of the burning trees Bay through a maelstrom of flames. One refugee who made it said the sound of the falling of the burning trees was like a continual discharge of artillery.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Others reported that the ground itself had burned the soles of their shoes. The drought and the low humidity had made the organic soil itself combustible. On Sunday, September 24th, Peshtigo's faithful packed the churches, but even in the midst of the service, the whistle blew, signaling another outbreak, and for the third time in 24 hours, hundreds of men were called to fight the advancing flames. Peter Pernin wrote, it is as though you attempted to resist the approach of an avalanche of fire hurled against you. An impromptu fire company fought the blazes for three days, and on Monday, just as the fire threatened to invade Aconto Avenue, the wind finally shifted to the south and the exhausted men beat back the flames. The people had saved their town. There were still terrible after effects throughout the region.

Starting point is 00:06:09 Everyone in Marinette had itchy, watering, bloodshot eyes, and so many children in Conto had fevers and coughs that the superintendent closed the day schools. But by Wednesday, people were struggling to resume a normal existence, and in the days that followed, they began to think the worst had passed. It hadn't. On October 5th, fires were still burning all the way from Lake Michigan to the Dakota Territory, and a grim new factor had entered the picture. A terrific storm from Galveston was making its way north toward Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where it would create an atmospheric instability that could sweep individual fires into one catastrophic blaze. And with the telegraph down, Peshtigo and the outlying

Starting point is 00:06:45 communities were still isolated from the rest of the nation. With fire still haunting the woods, the countryside was blanketed in smoke and the sun was barely visible overhead. Franklin Tilton wrote, the sky was brass, the earth was ashes. The townspeople still hoped for the best. There had been no rain, but the town now seemed guarded by a rampart of burned trees. Some fires were still smoldering, but few were actively alight. But Pernan wrote that he had noticed a stifling and heavy atmosphere, a mysterious silence in the air. And at 7 a.m. on October 7th, the wind turned to the southwest. That was the worst possible scenario. The Texas gale had arrived, and deep in the forest a cyclonic storm was gathering

Starting point is 00:07:24 that fanned the smaller forest fires into a conflagration that menaced the town with smoke even as it deepened and spread. By 4 o'clock that afternoon, no one in Peshtigo could see more than 16 feet in front of him, and under a glowing sky an unspeakable sound was advancing through the western woods. Survivors compared it to a thousand locomotives rushing at full speed, a deafening, persistent roar that never stopped but kept growing louder, a pounding waterfall, a hurricane. Phineas Eames described it to his brother as a sullen roar like an earthquake. More than deafening, it was grand. It was like the thunder and the roar of the sea all combined. It was fearfully sublime.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Embers began dropping into the streets. One correspondent to The Advocate wrote, If you suppose the worst snowstorm you ever witnessed, and each snowflake a coal or spark driven before a fierce wind, you have some idea of the state of the atmosphere at the time the fire struck the town. Pernin wrote, The wind, forerunner of the tempest, was increasing in violence, the redness in the sky deepening, and the roaring sound like thunder seemed almost upon us. As the temperature climbed, an unnameable smell filled the sky deepening, and the roaring sound like thunder seemed almost upon us. As the temperature climbed, an unnameable smell filled the town as gases mixed with the smoke.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Herds of cats scrambled up Oconto Avenue. A deer stumbled into the road, and a pack of dogs crouched at its feet. Father Pernin's bird began to beat its wings frantically against its cage. By 8 p.m. on October 8th, the wind had increased to 60 miles an hour. Pernin, hurrying to his house near the church, saw a dense cloud of smoke overhanging the earth, a vivid red reflection of immense extent. It was joined with a roaring, he wrote, the sound of this strange and unknown voice of nature constantly augmenting in terrible majesty. He had just warned his neighbor to get to the river when the storm broke. A fireball flung itself into a tree and sent flames into the surrounding houses. He dashed through his door to retrieve a chalice and saw sparks flying from room to room. The air was saturated with gas. He found the chalice, left

Starting point is 00:09:14 the house, and put his hand on the front gate. It was 8 45 p.m. A fireball hit one house and set it aflame. Another house rose 100 feet into the air and exploded. 16-year-old Helga Rockstead raced along the boardwalk, her hair streaming fire behind her. A small boy knelt to pray and burst into flames. Throughout the county, the fire had crowned in the trees, creating huge convection updrafts, drawing in wind, and sending out wreaths and streamers of fire. More than 2.5 million acres were burning now, and burning with a fury that the Wisconsinites had never seen before. Survivors said the fire whirled like a tornado at astonishing speed and seemed to feed on itself. Even trees that had burned previously burst into flame again as their charcoal reignited.

Starting point is 00:09:54 This was a fire vortex, a whirlwind that fed itself and created its own weather pattern. The flames reached more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than a crematorium, melting rails and incinerating people. One survivor described the roar as the sound of judgment. Denise Guess and William Lutz, who've written the fullest history of all this, call the Peshtigo fire a monster, a giant, a fiend, a tempest arriving on waves, wings, columns, and plumes, and always more beautiful than, faster than, fiercer than, hotter than the mind can fathom. Eyewitnesses said they saw fireballs drive into town and lift a house off its foundations. The four-story woodenware factory exploded, sending burning toothpicks, broom handles, and wooden tubs flying through the air. The river became the one hope for survival,

Starting point is 00:10:37 and people from outlying settlements had to race through roads full of wind and flames to reach it. Even in the water, logs burst into flame amid struggling crowds of people and animals. The bridge above the river was soon crowded with people, and it collapsed under their weight, dropping more victims into the frigid water. Near the Menominee River, Elbridge Merrill and his men gave up trying to put out the fire with buckets of water and struggled to the riverbank, trying to breathe without searing their lungs. He wrote, We little knew our enemy. A wave of fire rolled toward them, reared its crest, and swept like lightning through the forest. He had found an infant on the riverbank and would spend the night ducking repeatedly under the surface, trying to keep its

Starting point is 00:11:12 hair from catching fire. They were sheltered from the main body of flame by the 10-foot bank, but an almost solid ceiling of flame unrolled above them. After midnight, the rain finally came and the sun rose weakly on a scene of unthinkable destruction. The fire had destroyed every house in town except for part of one. It had eaten the boarding house, the company store, the mills, and the churches. It had split boulders in two and melted the bell of the firehouse. An entire train loaded with lumber had disappeared, leaving only a burned engine and melted wheels. Cinders had set fire to a ship two miles from land. Partially burned pieces of roof shingle had landed on the deck of a schooner seven miles

Starting point is 00:11:50 out in the bay. Luther Noyes, surveying the damage afterward, said the remains of some people were barely enough to fill a thimble. Countless infants and children lay scattered dead in the forest, where toppled trees had left holes 70 feet wide. The Peshtigo River was full of dead people and dead fish. As the survivors emerged and found each other, they compared their stories. One man had dragged his wife through the fire to reach the river, only to discover that he'd saved not his

Starting point is 00:12:14 wife, but a stranger. A burial party encountered a boy about 12 years old digging a row of graves in the charred countryside. When the fire had struck, he'd crawled into a well and covered his head with a wet blanket. He emerged to find all nine of his family dead. He asked fire had struck, he'd crawled into a well and covered his head with a wet blanket. He emerged to find all nine of his family dead. He asked the burial party, what am I to do alone in the world now? One man had been caught searching bodies for valuables. A jury was formed and he was condemned to be hanged, but there was no rope to be found. As the survivors explored the countryside, they found a nightmarish tableau. Where a livery stable had once stood, the carcasses of 50 horses lay in rows where they had stood in their stalls. The stable itself had disappeared. A group of Swedish workmen had been digging a ditch to serve as a firebreak. Burial parties found the ditch and

Starting point is 00:12:54 the melted metal of their shovels and pickaxes, but nothing else. Outside town, searchers found the huddled bodies of 68 people who had sought refuge in an open field. John Bagnall found the huddled bodies of 68 people who had sought refuge in an open field. John Bagnall found the body of a young girl with long curly hair lying by a log as if sleeping. Struck by her peacefulness, he clipped a lock of her hair, which he carried in his wallet for the rest of his life. Pernin wrote, one of the workmen engaged in the construction of the church was found, knife in hand, with his throat cut, two of his children lying beside him in a similar condition, while his wife lay a little farther off, having evidently been burned to death. The name of this man was Towsley, and during the whole summer he had worked at the Church of Peshtigo. Doubtless seeing his wife fall near him and

Starting point is 00:13:32 becoming convinced of the utter impossibility of escaping a fiery death, his mind became troubled, and he put an end to his own existence and that of his children. The Peshtigo Fire of 1871 was the deadliest wildfire in American history, but most people have never heard of it. That's because, by a cruel coincidence, it occurred on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, which dominated headlines at the time. But where 300 people had died in the Chicago Fire, about six times that number had died in Peshtigo, 90% of the town's residents. And there were many more dead in the outlying districts. of the town's residents, and there were many more dead in the outlying districts. The disaster in Wisconsin was so total that the survivors couldn't even call for help.

Starting point is 00:14:13 The telegraph line had been destroyed, and all the roads were blocked by fallen trees, dead horses, cattle, human bodies, and debris. They had to send word of the disaster by a steamer, which didn't arrive in Green Bay until Monday evening. It would be days before even the state capital heard about the disaster. In fact, the governor of Wisconsin couldn't organize help immediately because he was away helping victims of the Chicago fire. In an odd way, the Peshtigo fire was so ferocious that it burned itself out of history. No accurate death toll has been established because the fire burned up all the local records, and more than 350 people had to be buried in a mass grave because no one was left alive who could identify them. Altogether, 1.2 million acres of forest had been consumed, an area 50% larger than Rhode Island,

Starting point is 00:14:51 and 12 communities had been destroyed. It's remembered by firefighters, who refer to its deadly combination of wind, topography, and fire as the Peshtigo Paradigm, and by historians. During World War II, the American and British military studied the Peshtigo Paradigm, and by historians. During World War II, the American and British military studied the Peshtigo Blaze as they planned the deadly firebombings of Japanese and German cities. It's amazing, author Bill Lutz told the Baltimore Sun. I read a Japanese account of what the firebombing was like in Tokyo. If you took out three or four words, you were describing Peshtigo.

Starting point is 00:15:32 Tony Hart wrote to us, Hi Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. In several of your recent podcasts, you discussed the notion of movie scripts being created by neural networks. Believe it or not, computers have been used to create scenarios as long ago as 1960. While I was studying computer engineering at university in the early 1970s, I came across a reference to a book called The Thinking Machine, the companion to a CBS television special from the 1960s. The original article had talked about using a computer to generate a TV western script.

Starting point is 00:16:03 And Tony said that he eventually found both the book and more recently a YouTube video of the TV special. And for anyone who wants to check out the YouTube video, Tony notes that older listeners may recognize comedian Jack Guilford playing the bank robber, and that the original TV program was aired on October 26, 1960, not 1961 as the video description claims. So this is a really early example of an AI program to produce creative content. The TV show presented

Starting point is 00:16:33 some acted out screenplays that were written by Computer TXO. As you might expect for 1960, these screenplays had no dialogue and were variations on a rather simple plot. A robber takes refuge in a shack, is discovered by the sheriff, and they have a shootout. There are only the two characters and only a few props that they interact with, such as their guns, two bags of money, and a bottle of whiskey and a glass. I was kind of amused at how a major plot point often seemed to be the robber drinking a lot of whiskey, including in one version right before he dies after being fatally shot by the sheriff. I guess maybe that makes some sense. Doug Ross, whose name might sound familiar to anyone who's listened to the ending of our show, but who in this case was a computer specialist at MIT who supervised the writing of the computer

Starting point is 00:17:23 program for TXO, said that while this project was a lot of fun, the point of it was to illustrate some important things about artificial intelligence, such as that intelligent behavior is rule-obeying behavior, and to demonstrate how a computer can be made to do creative work. Ross showed some flow charts to demonstrate how the screenplay was created by the program choosing among alternatives, like what to do when the sheriff sees the robber. He may wait, advance on the robber, or try to shoot from where he is, and rules to determine the character's behavior or to modify other rules, such as an inebriation factor that may affect the robber's

Starting point is 00:18:01 behavior. On the TV show, you see some different versions of the screenplay where, for example, the robber drinks less and thus is able to shoot at the sheriff with more accuracy. And this time it's the sheriff who drinks immediately before dying of his wounds. While watching this, I was wondering what rules they gave to the computer about humans and drinking. They do show one version of the script where both the robber and the sheriff get stuck in endless loops. After the sheriff puts his gun in the robber's holster, the robber endlessly spins the barrel of his gun while the sheriff endlessly drinks from the whiskey bottle. This was obviously not quite as successful of a script, though still somewhat entertaining. After watching this section on the YouTube video, I checked out the relevant section

Starting point is 00:18:45 of the book The Thinking Machine by John Pfeiffer. 1960 predates me and at least some of our audience, so it's useful to keep in mind how little familiarity most people had with computers at that time and how limited computers were in function compared to now. Now we have no trouble imagining a computer attempting to write a screenplay, and while we may be amused at the endeavor, we aren't really surprised. In 1960, this seems to have been considered a much more revolutionary activity for a computer to attempt. Yeah, it seems, I think it's really creative even to think up this application for a computer with those limitations, you know? Right, especially given at the time nobody

Starting point is 00:19:24 associated computers with creativity in any kind of way. They were mostly for computing, right? For computational activities. It took Doug Ross and his colleague Harrison Morse two months of often working late into the night to write Saga 2, the program that wrote these screenplays. The plays were printed out as a series of short lines describing the situation and the actions of the two characters, such as, Gun is in right hand, Money is in left hand, Robber is in corner, Right hand is on robber, Left hand is on robber, Holster is on robber, Bottle is on table, Right hand has gun, Left hand has money, Holster has nothing.

Starting point is 00:20:07 Pfeiffer says that the TXO had Ross and Morse had coded words into unique binary numbers, such as 111 standing for robber and 110 standing for right hand, and then wrote the rules for permissible sequences of words. Robber takes gun, holster right hand, and then wrote the rules for permissible sequences of words. Robber takes gun, holster right hand, for the robber takes the gun from the holster with his right hand is permissible. But gun takes robber, holster right hand is not. Ross and Morse didn't always foresee some of the impermissible ways that the program might try to arrange the words, such as in the script where the sheriff puts his gun into the robber's holster. The first part of the script was set, but then the program got to some switches, which were choice points, where it would choose one of a small set of

Starting point is 00:20:54 alternatives based on the generation of a random number. Some alternatives were weighted for probability, such as when the sheriff approaches the shack, he'll look in the window before entering it 80% of the time. During the shootout, each shot could be a miss, a nick, or a killing hit. The chances of a good shot go down for each nick that a character has sustained and for each drink that he's had. The robber frequently drinks before the sheriff arrives, while the sheriff will only drink after the shootout, and thus the sheriff gets to win the shootout 75% of the time. You know, in its way, that's kind of sophisticated, you know, that much detail about what affects the behavior. Exactly, yeah. That's what they were trying for these rules that would modify other rules,

Starting point is 00:21:37 which is, you're right, that is kind of sophisticated. Other than unanticipated errors, the script writing program shouldn't have produced anything that we would really call original, except that one time it did. The rule for the scripts was that the winner of the shootout would take the money bags, leave the shack, and take one last look through the window. However, in one script, the sheriff thought he had won and went through his prescribed routine, but the robber wasn't actually dead. Since the script also told the robber to take the money, the actor reached through the window and grabbed it from the sheriff. Then he left the shack and joined the sheriff at the window. So this story ended with both of them on the outside looking into an empty room. Pfeiffer says, this is the closest the machine came to writing an original script. They couldn't find anything wrong with the computer or the program, and Pfeiffer said that it was just a mystery why the sheriff thought he had won.

Starting point is 00:22:29 I was thinking maybe TXO was just tired of the constraints they'd given it. Maybe it just wanted both of them to win and join forces. Why does there always have to be a winner and a loser? Pfeiffer said that it took 5,500 instructions just to turn out these simple screenplays without any dialogue, and it really does seem to have been seen as a bit astonishing for its time. In both the TV show and the book, there is clearly the idea that some may see a computer being able to do this as rather like magic, and those involved took some pains to counter that idea. In the TV episode, Ross said, there is no black magic about doing these things on machines.

Starting point is 00:23:08 It's marvelous to do them on machines, but far from miraculous. And he's quoted in the book also as saying, there is no black magic about the behavior of computers. As he stresses how even if the computer seems to be breaking the rules, it's actually doing it in a structured, rule-bound way. And I thought, well, except for maybe that one time. Thanks so much to everyone who sends us feedback and follow-ups. We appreciate hearing what you have to say. So if you have any to send to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:23:50 Closet.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Michael Grigoriev. In some parts of Nova Scotia, 1923 became known as the year of free beef. Why? The year of free beef. Okay, by beef do you mean meat from a cow? Yes. And by free do you mean people received meat from a cow without paying for it? Yes. Okay, so there were people in Nova Scotia.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Well. No? No. Okay. I'm going to be careful here just because it might help you. Okay. Oxen is particularly what we're talking about. Ah.

Starting point is 00:24:30 And it's that the prices of beef dropped. They weren't, it wasn't completely free. They weren't actually free. But they dropped precipitously. Oh, okay. I don't know if that helps at all, but I'm offering it. Well, okay, sure. So in 1923, the prices of oxen dropped precipitously, correct?

Starting point is 00:24:49 The price of beef did. The price of... Not live oxen. Sorry, yes. Okay. The price of meat from oxen dropped precipitously in parts of Nova Scotia. Yes. Specifically. And that's important, believe it or not. Could we say that it dropped precipitously for all the people living in those specific

Starting point is 00:25:08 parts of Nova Scotia, as opposed to just certain groups got beef for much cheaper? Yeah, no, I think we'd say everybody in that affected region. Okay, so all the customers in that area. Okay, so is the hub of this, why did the price of oxen meat drop so precipitously in this specific year, in this specific place? Yes. Aha. Okay. Is the year important? Something about the year historically, like following on World War I or anything like that? Yes. Something happened. Something happened. Okay. And is the specific location important for some specific reason? Well, yes.

Starting point is 00:25:45 I'll just say something happened in Nova Scotia on April 15th, 1923. If this isn't mysterious enough already. Something that I probably wouldn't have heard of. So it's like not connected to world politics or world history. Right, but apparently it's connected to the price of oxen meat. Okay. Something happened on a very specific day. Would you say it's a weather-related event?

Starting point is 00:26:06 No. Would you say it's some sort of accident or emergency or... I can't think of the word I'm looking for. When a big bad thing happens, you know, like explosions or... No. No. So there was an event that occurred that wasn't related to weather or what you'd call an accident or some kind of

Starting point is 00:26:25 critical event in that respect. The thing, I'll just tell you to help it along. The thing that happened on April 15th was... I apparently seem to need a lot of help. Well, no, there's just a lot to unearth here. The thing that happened on April 15th was a measure that was introduced by the government. Oh, something that was enacted. Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:44 The government and... Oh. Was it that people... measure that was introduced by the government. Oh, something that was enacted. Okay. The government and, oh, was it that people, huh. Okay. So a law was passed. Would you say a law was passed? Yes, or enacted. Enacted. Something happened.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And did it take effect on that day? Yes. Okay. So it's not something that was going to take effect that was going to affect meat prices. No, it's like so the society changed in a certain way that had... People weren't allowed to sell oxen meat anymore? No, and this measure, I'll say also, wasn't intended directly to affect oxen at all. It had this inadvertent outcome. Oh, oh.

Starting point is 00:27:21 Sorry, I'm helping it along so much, but there's just a lot to... Yeah, no, there's a lot that would take me a very long time to figure out. Yes, I get that. Okay, so a law was passed that, like, when the people were writing it, they were not thinking of oxen. Not at all. Were they thinking of any kind of livestock? No, they were not.

Starting point is 00:27:39 Were they thinking of anything to do with farming or agriculture? Actually, no. No. Something to do with sales and commerce? Not even that. Not even that. This is a completely unexpected side effect. This is a completely unexpected side effect.

Starting point is 00:27:54 So something to do with public health and welfare in any, or safety in any? Not even that. I'm trying to think of another clue I can give you. Something to do with speed limits. I don't know. You're close with that. I'm trying to think of another clue I can give you. Something to do with speed limits. I don't know. You're close with that. Close with speed limits. Closer.

Starting point is 00:28:10 That was just a random... Something to do with roads. Yes. Something to do with driving. Yes. Wow. Something to do with motorists. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:20 And somehow this affected oxen. Something to do with cars versus... Yes. Something to do with automobiles versus the people driving them. So just to connect those two things. Something to do with automobiles. How might it change the way motorists conduct themselves? Affect the price of oxen meat.

Starting point is 00:28:38 Yeah, driving it down. Driving it down, because they were killing oxen and they were selling the roadkill as meat. That's right. Seriously. Seriously. Yes. They were allowing people to drive in places where they hadn't been allowed to drive before and there were oxen in the way. You're extremely close.

Starting point is 00:28:54 They were being hit by cars. This measure affected- They took out the fences. They took out- Oh, no. No, you're very, very close. Fences and the oxen wandered onto the roads. As I understand it, all the motorists in Nova Scotia,

Starting point is 00:29:06 this measure took effect and affected everyone on April 15th, apparently, in 1923. They let them drive faster. You're very close. That's not it. So that they were hitting things more easily. You're so close, I might just give it to you. I'm trying to think what else I haven't guessed yet. There's no point in making you. Okay, motorists are hitting oxen because of a change in the laws. Yeah, there's like several different things it to you. I'm trying to think what else I haven't guessed it. I mean, there's no point in making you... Okay, motorists are hitting oxen

Starting point is 00:29:25 because of a change in the laws. Yeah, there's like several different things it could be. And I'll just say the oxen being oxen weren't notified of this change

Starting point is 00:29:33 and didn't change their own behavior on the roads. Okay, is it that motorists were driving in places they weren't driving before? Technically, yes. Technically, yes.

Starting point is 00:29:43 And the oxen... They were using the same roads. But somehow still driving. Oh, allowed to drive at night. No. Let me just give it to you because you're so close. It's ridiculous. Congratulations for getting that far with so little to start with.

Starting point is 00:29:56 On April 15th of that year, the rule of the road changed in Nova Scotia. Traffic that had formerly kept to the left side of the road now moved to the right. Oxen that had been trained to keep to the left could not be retrained to follow the new rule. Oxen are notoriously slow-witted. Oh, wow. So, well done. Wow. Oh, my. I don't know that I would have guessed that they started driving on the other side of the road. Thank you, Michael, for letting me add in. That's a very clever connection there.

Starting point is 00:30:29 If anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll get extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, the Futility Closet feline empress. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link. At our website, you'll also find over 10,000 bite-sized distractions, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast,

Starting point is 00:31:21 with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Many thanks to my brother-in-law, Doug Ross, who isn't an MIT computer specialist, but who did provide all the excellent music that you hear in our show. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 243-The Peshtigo Fire

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.